If you are aiming to be an alliance captain, then IMO, being able to score the trap is essential to this goal at most competitions. Further, let’s assume your team toes not include a world-class ring tosser.
Let’s start with the easy case. If neither of your alliance partners can climb, that RP is impossible. Concentrate on getting the other 3 RP via scoring rings.
Second case: both of your alliance partners can climb. As long as at least one of you can climb at other than the low point of the chain, you should be able to get the RP via a HARMONY. However, at many competitions, esp early in the season, this may be a rare situation. Note: If you climb and score trap you are insulated from one of your partners having their climb fail.
Final case, and I would argue likely the most common case early in the season, just one of your partners can do a basic climb. Here being able to climb and score the trap is the only path to that RP.
Further, I would suggest that the Human Player should toss the HIGH NOtES as soon as allowed – and should they happen to succeed on one of the MICS, use that to decide which chain(s) to climb, rather than climbing first and hoping they happen to ring your MIC.
I like the idea of using the trap with an amp-only bot to be a booster, during the amped period you clear from the main area to climb and score during the 13s period after button is pressed where amp notes scored during that time don’t count towards amplification, but you can still get 5 pts towards it w trap, making it only require one trap during endgame with two climbers. Just think it’s an interesting strategy
I definately dont believe that to be true that amp bots are likely trap bots. The trap is a similar mechanism 30" higher than the amp. The lowest part of the chain is 28" off the ground. The more i look at the trap the harder it appears.
If you build a trap bot i think many could be amp bots, but most amp bots wont be trap bots.
The problem is that two bots have to climb to get the RP. That was FIRST’s idea I think of making sure that there is CO-OP between two bots to get the RP.
The one thing I’ll say about trap bots being amp bots is this: the trap is technically complex enough that if your team can do it and it makes sense as an objective given your team’s resources, you’re likely looking at both the amp and the speaker. If you’re looking to use the amp to seed very high at the competition through more RP, you’ll still need to win matches. 5 points is a fair amount, but idk if it’s worth majorly sacrificing cycle time for (due to time, design constraints)
I thought that was the case and I thought that if I analyzed the data for this past season I could provide some insight into the usefulness of being able to score trap points. I’ve run into a problem with the data as I’ve found 430 matches where an alliance earned all four RPs but didn’t have at least two robots on stage. Were there there different scoring rules for some events?